Projects

Recent blog entries by dannyobrien

apenwarr: I know what you mean about the old monolithic mozilla, but phoenix^Wfirebird has a couple of nice UI innovations that mean there are genuinely useful additions for everyday users. The main one, I think, is that the popup disabling stuff is pretty much automatic. Your grandma may not know what a popup is, but I'm sure she's irritated by whatever the hell those funny windows are. I imagine that thunderbird's anti-spam training, with a better UI and/or explanation would be a killer too.

Spam and popup disabling are the two biggest peeves I've seen people have with the Net these days. The mozilla project goes as far as anything I've seen to fixing those problems for everyday users. The UI could do with some tweaks, but it's getting there. And people are seriously motivated to fine solutions to these problems - it's amazing watching one person in the office discover a solution, and teach it to everyone else they know for instance.

tk, hypatia : I mailed esr about the random redirects from his old pages. He didn't know anything about it (and couldn't see the redirects from his home machine) - so it's not deliberate. It is annoying though.

So there was one link which I didn't include in the Bayesian round-up in this week's NTK, but might be interesting to folk here:

The Bow Toolkit is a "toolkit for statistical language modeling, text retrieval, classification and clustering". It came recommended by the OpenCola folk. I didn't have enough time (or expertise, really) to have a proper look at it, but it looks pretty nice.

"So who does contribute, and why? Members include famous
Linux and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) hackers like
Jordan Hubbard, Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond
and Jamie Zawinski, although few
of them are active on the site. Others purport to be God,
Satan, Nietzsche, Richard Stallman and Need to Know's Danny
O'Brien, but these claims have yet to be confirmed."